Top 10 Benefits to Partnering and Outsourcing Learning & Development in 2018

As the New Year stretches before us and you review your organization’s goals and budgets for 2018, you will most likely be evaluating your learning and development (L&D) programs, including training.

Training is as critical as ever to the success of an organization—especially to stay competitive in a fierce market. When your employees’ workdays revolve around processes, operational tasks, emails, meetings, and reports—there is little time for more high-value work, strategic planning, and creativity. The root cause of this imbalance is complexity.

Because of increasing complexity, more organizations have been seeking out strategic partnerships with external L&D organizations. They can join forces to plan, manage, execute, and report on their L&D activities—working seamlessly with existing L&D teams to swiftly reach goals and empower the workforce. Partnering effectively also enables the L&D organization to truly focus on strategic initiatives critical to meeting the company’s objectives, where internal knowledge and capabilities will have the most impact.

Here are our top 10 benefits to companies when they choose to source more of their L&D activities with external partners in 2018:

1. Leverage Available Technology

It is more cost-effective to license an LMS/LCMS than designing and building it with an internal team. Take advantage of the work of others. An experienced L&D partner can provide turn-key solutions that include access to Learning Management Systems, best-in-class content development tools, industry-leading virtual classrooms, and more.

2. Align Learning & Development to the Business

For many companies, training is a necessity. But the development, management, and delivery of training could be a distraction or worse—it could be completely misaligned to critical business priorities. Your people may be learning skills that are not immediately useful in their current roles or to the goals of the business. In addition, the business often demands training delivery that isn’t mission critical, with internal training teams “taking orders” instead of strategically partnering on the right solution with the appropriate timing. Partnering with an experienced L&D company should provide you with the strategic guidance to eliminate unnecessary or redundant training and focus on what’s a priority with positive impact for the business. Aligning with a flexible partner can ensure that your training programs are targeting current gaps; they will usually offer content development, training delivery, training logistics, and coordination to fill those gaps.

3. Generate Revenue

Can businesses use learning and development to create new sources of revenue? Companies that own valuable intellectual property with their solutions can outsource training to experienced L&D partners and sell access to a mass audience to generate revenue.

4. Mitigate Risk

Training helps prevent failures and protects us from liabilities if we don’t provide the right training. If we don’t provide the training our employees or customers need, when they need it, we’re vulnerable. Partnering with a company who specializes in training could help prevent unnecessary risk and failure costs.

5. Improve Scalability of Resources

Running an internal training organization requires people of various levels of skills and talent. Full-time internal staff is a fixed resource, but training delivery is a variable activity. Using an external supplier allows you to flex the number of resources to deliver the training you need—when you need them. It allows your company to scale up and down based on the demand of training you need.

6. Gain an Outsider’s Perspective

All organizations are in danger of falling into the same bad habits when it comes to L&D. Work routines become so ingrained that it becomes difficult to change when new systems or initiatives are introduced. Bringing in an outside team, especially one that has a great amount of experience in organizational change management and technology adoption strategies, is a way to overcome resistance to change in training programs and to ensure the behavior changes that are necessary to long-term success.

7. Speed to Market

Bringing a new product to market may be dependent on getting resellers trained on how to sell or service your product. Using a training outsourcing company may allow you to get your product into a lot of customers’ hands much faster, without the need for scaling up internal resources.

8. Create Global Learning for Every Office Around the Globe

If you already have training teams working together from every office around the globe, then you are ahead of the curve. Chances are that you will need translations and culturally-appropriate learning support quickly—and outsourcing to a third-party with those resources and experience will make sure your project comes in within budget and the allotted timeframe.

9. Gain Greater Access to Talent

Do you strongly believe that your business has all the internal skills and knowledge it needs to be successful? Critical systems are always changing. The introduction of Cloud Computing to your employees is causing an entire workforce in SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and other systems to re-learn a way of working. Your processes will change significantly, and users will need to deal with more change in their jobs than ever before. It’s becoming frequently necessary to hire external experts to teach internal employees how to adapt and do their jobs in these new systems with these new processes.

10. Reduce Costs and Increase L&D Impact

The number one reason why companies outsource L&D is to save money. Partnering with a company that specializes in L&D means that your company can stay nimble as projects fluctuate. Find an organization that can scale resources as your business needs it—so you never pay for training specialists or instructional designers when you don’t need them. You also get the most competitive rates on top talent with the best matches of skills needed for each project—enabling your L&D teams to focus on where they will provide the greatest value to the business. Flexible partners should be willing to jump in and help to support an organization.

Watch our on-demand webinar, “Benefits of Partnering and Outsourcing for Learning & Development in 2018,” recorded on January 24, 2018.Watch Now